The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (Classic Reprint) - Henry Fielding

Excerpt from The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great
There are, in the history of English literature, a few, perhaps too few, figures which hold their place and glow there like fixed stars in the firmament. Thanks to the changes of times and tastes, the great writers of one generation are relegated to obscurity, or at least to subsidiary importance, by the next, their title to eminence becomes a matter of critical question, and the qualities that made them notable and popular are caviled at and belittled. But in the world of English letters there is one figure that stands supreme and sound, unsullied by detraction, and unaffected by carping dissection or querulous analysis, like one of those statues of bronze that, after centuries of warfare and ages of national ruin, are exhumed in all their splendid and massive integrity, to serve as monuments in modern times to the matchless art of a legendary and dimly defined past. Henry Fielding was not only the first great English novelist, but he remains to this day, and for all time, one of the greatest. The mutations of time and manners, and the changes of fashions of thought and of expressions, that have dethroned so many of his contemporaries and successors, have passed him by unscathed, and if one seeks the reason for his enduring hold upon the living world, one may find it, as Thackeray did, and give it shape in Thackeray's own words:
"What a genius! What a vigor! What a bright-eyed intelligence and observation! What a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! What a cheerfulness! What a manly relish of life! What a poet is here!
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